Chris Moffat

Third World Historical articulates a research agenda for a project suggestively housed as a special section in the pages of CSSAAME (42.2).The editor’s community webpage on Borderlines features experimental writings that enact the project’s attention to questions of form. Here, the intention is to engage in a collaborative project that is its own form of archive building, a portal that speaks to the wider themes of the Third World Historical. The essays in Borderlines highlight the visceral and the relational as distinct from abstract concepts of revolution as complete breaks. The words in these pieces are never failure, or defeat but stories of complicity, compromise, and fragmentation. By emphasizing relationality, movement, and complicity we aim to think concretely about moving between a world overwhelmed by structural forces that preclude action and an imagined world filled with boundless agents detached from history, an equally self-defeating proposition.

The Summit Minar at Lahore’s Faisal Chowk is 160 feet tall and punctures a large open space in front of the Punjab Assembly building. But passing by at street level, you could be forgiven for missing it. The monument is surprisingly inconspicuous. Perhaps it is the narrow form, or the fact that one’s eyes are distracted, at this important intersection on the Mall Road, by the usual scrum of noisy traffic.

In this “panoramic view,” illustrating the February 1975 edition of the Pakistan Times that announced the monument’s construction, the Minar seems to pull its surroundings towards its base, drawing the park into its foundations. Closest to the vortex is an ornate Indo-Saracenic pavilion, designed by pre-partition Lahore’s foremost architect, Bhai Ram Singh (1859–1914), protégé of Lockwood Kipling. Until 1951, it held a statue of Queen Victoria; in more recent decades, it shelters a bronze replica of the Quran.

The Minar’s placement at Faisal Chowk represents a postcolonial intervention into a landscape defined by colonial urban planning. The Chowk, which is still overwhelmingly referred to by the colonial toponym “Charing Cross,” was designed by Basil Sullivan in 1914. It is flanked by the colonnaded Shah Din Manzil (1914), once home to restaurants for local elites but today a bank and shopping center, and the Masonic Lodge (1917), formerly known to Lahoris as the mysterious Jadoo Ghar (house of magic) but now housing decidedly spiritless government offices. The major building here is the neoclassical Punjab Assembly, designed in 1938 by Sullivan himself.

The Minar follows other post-colonial additions to the square, notably Edward Durrell Stone’s 1967 headquarters for the Water and Power Development Authority, WAPDA House—a modernist mid-rise crowned with a plexiglass dome and reputedly Pakistan’s first air-conditioned building. But if WAPDA House is associated closely with American involvement in Pakistan during General Ayub Khan’s “decade of development,” the Summit Minar commemorates a project of Third World realignments after his downfall, and more specifically a heady moment of pan-Islamic solidarity forged in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis.

The monument was designed by the Turkish architect Vedat Dalokay (1927–1991) and was commissioned by the government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as a tribute to the 1974 Islamic Summit. This meeting, which brought together in Lahore representatives from thirty-eight countries in the Muslim world, including twenty-three heads of state, was the second of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), founded five years earlier in Rabat, Morocco. In 1969, leaders of Muslim-majority nations were brought together in a reactive mode, responding to a fire at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, and the desire for a united global voice ran up against deep ideological divisions among its members. In 1974, the countries came together in a spirit of optimism and purpose, buoyed by the new influence of oil-rich Muslim states on the world stage and also by the gains made by Arab forces against Israel in the 1973 October War.

From 22 to 24 February 1974, representatives from Algeria to Afghanistan, Mali to Malaysia were ferried past crowds along a highly decorated Mall Road. They delivered speeches in the Assembly building at Charing Cross, dined in the Mughal-era Shalimar Gardens, and prayed together in the seventeenth-century Badshahi Masjid adjacent Lahore’s historic walled city. Indira Gandhi, then Prime Minister of Pakistan’s great rival India, scorned the event as an attempt to “create a rift” on religious lines among non-aligned nations. But the Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai offered his felicitations, hailing the opportunity not only to contribute to “the unity of Islamic countries and peoples” but thereby to “the unity of the Third World.”[1] The second point of the “Declaration of Lahore, the joint statement agreed upon by Summit participants, affirmed the assembled states’ “identification with the joint struggle of the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America.”  (P.221)

At the forefront of discussions in Lahore was the Palestinian struggle, which was affirmed as “the cause of all those who believe in the right of a people to determine its own destiny by itself and by its free will.” Alongside recognising Yasser Arafat as a “Head of State,” the Summit resolved that “full and effective support should be given to the Arab countries to recover, by all means available, all their occupied lands.”(P.222) The call to sever relations with Israel—which posed problems for several member states, not least Iran, which in this late-Pahlavi era had close economic ties with Israel—was paired with broader expressions of solidarity with struggles against racism and colonialism in Rhodesia and South Africa. But in the history of modern South Asia, the event’s significance is marked by the reception of Mujibur Rahman as Prime Minister of Bangladesh. Just over two years earlier, Mujib had been confined to a Pakistani prison a short distance from Lahore, detained as leader of a liberation movement in what was then East Pakistan.

The rapprochement between Pakistan and Bangladesh was facilitated by other members of the OIC, namely Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, and Indonesia. It represented a diplomatic coup for Bhutto, a spectacle of reconciliation on the international stage that effectively masked the internal crisis provoked in Pakistan by the brutality of the 1971 war. Indeed, the Summit allowed Bhutto to buckle down on Pakistan’s desired status as leader amongst Muslim nations, deferring any sort of soul-searching that might have been provoked by the disastrous halving of its territory and the atrocities committed by the Pakistani army against its former citizens.

The artist and anthropologist Naeem Mohaiemen considers the Lahore Summit’s significance for Third World politics in the 2017 film Two Meetings and a Funeral. For Mohaiemen, Bangladesh’s pivot to the OIC is symptomatic of a broader fracturing of the Non-Aligned Movement’s socialist aspirations and the ascent of a new global Islamic constellation shaped by the power of a geopolitical oil bloc. The power of this constellation would have tremendous significance in Pakistan. The Summit was an opportunity to hail international brotherhood and the spiritual authority of Islam, but it was also more prosaically a chance to forge new trading networks. It marked an escalation of Pakistan’s economic relationship with the Gulf States, particularly the UAE and Saudi Arabia, who would become major importers of Pakistani labour. Not only did lucrative migration opportunities help to diffuse organized workers’ activism in Pakistan, but they also created a class of returning Pakistanis inspired by the pious conservatism of their host states and propelling, through their earnings, an emerging middle-class market for consumer goods in the country.

The Summit Minar is an architectural artefact of these realignments. Charing Cross was renamed Faisal Chowk in honour of Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal, who provided substantial financial support for Bhutto’s Summit. The architect Dalokay, who trained in Istanbul but also in Paris, interning in the offices of Auguste Perret and Le Corbusier, is best known in Pakistan for the extraordinary Faisal Masjid in Islamabad, also named for (and financed by) the king. Based on a design originally intended for Ankara but rejected by Turkish clients in favor of the neo-Ottoman Kocatepe Camii, Dalokay’s modernist approach to Islamic form found a worthy home in the new city of Islamabad. As Pakistan’s national mosque, it reflects the appeals to an abstracted, universalized Islamic identity that have characterized attempts to bind a population riven by ethnic, linguistic, and religious divisions.

The obelisk form of the Summit Minar is more conventional, reminiscent of the Washington Monument, which itself evokes ancient Egyptian architecture. The base is decorated with calligraphic inscriptions of the takbir—’Allāhu ’Akbar—and under ground level there is a museum for Islamic antiquities gifted by visitors to the Summit. Older generations in Lahore recall visiting the monument and museum, once a destination for school field trips, but for several decades now access has been restricted due to security concerns. The assembly grounds on which the Minar sits are heavily fortified against the threat of terrorism, a contemporary history of religious radicalism that also connects to Gulf exchanges. This did not stop the Minar from being stormed in 2016 by groups protesting the execution of Mumtaz Qadri, who assassinated Punjab Governor Salman Taseer for defending a Pakistani Christian convicted of blasphemy in 2011. Rather than attacking the structure, however, the trespassers simply looted some antique bracelets.

Because the Assembly is the centre of government for the powerful province of Punjab, Faisal Chowk plays host to a great number of protests and sit-ins, for which the dense traffic of Mall Road is necessarily redirected. The Summit Minar thus provides a backdrop for all variety of political causes, from hunger strikes by teachers to nurses calling for better pay to opposition parties demonstrating their strength. In November 2020, locked down in London, I watched speeches livestreamed from the Students Solidarity March, glimpsing the Minar behind comrades from the Progressive Students Collective. The monument is always just out of reach—separated by security, nestled closely to the corridors of power, a monument to an internationalism that has also been shaped by its distance from popular struggles. In spite of Palestine’s centrality in 1974 and the loud support for self-determination, it is notable that Kashmir was barely mentioned, for fear of offending member states still friendly with India.

I was in Lahore during the most recent visit of Mohammad bin Salman, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, in February 2019. Mall Road was decorated extravagantly to celebrate the visiting dignitary. Signs were strung up across Faisal Chowk, picturing MBS alongside Imran Khan and celebrating “brotherhood for peace, progress and development.” Fevered invocations of a special relationship were dampened somewhat by the fact that MBS proceeded from Pakistan to India, where he made many similar promises for investment and “strategic partnership.” One of the Mall Road signs, with its vaguely sinister message of “Pakistan and Saudi Arabia: Together Forever,” inadvertently communicated this dual status of friend and hostage. In late 2020, Pakistan’s ties to the Gulf Arab states have created a new problem: the increasing normalization of relations between countries like the UAE, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia with Israel. Khan has insisted Islamabad will “continue to follow in Jinnah’s footsteps vis-à-vis Palestine,” referencing the long history of opposing Zionism amongst South Asian Muslims, which precedes the creation of Pakistan itself. But this principled stance of defending Muslims against oppression around the world is sullied by Khan’s silence on China’s treatment of Uiyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, his conscience eased here by the multi-billion dollar investments into Pakistan through the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. The Summit Minar, designed to commemorate the lofty vision of 1974, the sense of a new world being made, cannot be extracted from this messy, imperfect history of compromise, complicity, and strategic posturing. A monument not to a “new dawn” but to a forlorn cause, a fragile and fracturing Third World.

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[1] See coverage in Dawn, 17 and 22 February 1974

Chris Moffat is Senior Lecturer in the School of History, Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of India’s Revolutionary Inheritance: Politics and the Promise of Bhagat Singh (2019), and is now writing a book on architecture and politics in Pakistan, provisionally titled Learning from Lahore.